212. Song No. 3,229: “Fall of ’82,” The Shins
Port of Morrow, 2012

(Greetings from my latest dance with COVID!)

When I say I loved The Shins eons before The Garden State made them indie-rock darlings, I swear it’s to establish just how long and deep-rooted my affinity for that band is and not to petulantly flaunt any longevity of ownership like my younger self so gleefully attempted to build a personality around. Like Spoon, The Shins are one of those bands who haven’t put out an album I didn’t like, even as their sound evolves farther and farther away from what first made me fall in love with the music they made.

I have loved this band for more than two goddamn decades, making them a much more warmly received voice from the past than, say, the invitation to my 20-year high school reunion that has absolutely inundated me with a mental clip show making me feel every bit of my perpetual uncoolness and hastening slog toward a cultural irrelevancy like I’ve never known: It no longer matters if I reject the trends like my more fiery teenage self did because they no longer waste their time appealing to geriatric millennials, even the ones whose DINK fridges betray just how much time, money and energy we still have to throw at frivolities. Oh, Inverted World! has remained a desert-island album through it all, and the Shins catalog that opened up in its wake is filled with so much I love for so many reasons across such vastly different chapters. I can fire up any Shins album at any time and it’s exactly what I want to hear for a couple-three rounds, or can admit that “This is way beyond my remote concern of being condescending” is still a lyric I want inked anywhere on my editing hand, even if I’ve gotten pretty far away from the person who embraced the line like a revelatory mantra.

Port of Morrow, The Shin’s fourth album or second most recent offering, doesn’t have the ethereal dreaminess of their debut, the poppy irresistibility of their sophomore record or the deeply personal external association (the first album my husband ever bought for me, released just two months after we started dating) that imbues the quirky rock and thoughtful lyrics of their third album with an especially deep fondness. While the aforementioned trio of LPs all feel like one, big cohesive movement through clearly different songs that share some unifying thread, Port of Morrow felt the most like an album covering different ground and going off in different directions all along its journey from its first note to its closing chords.

Which is funny, because it is arguably frontman James Mercer’s most autobiographical, personally plumbed-through collection of experiences as songs, arranged around musings from childhood through fatherhood, inspired by the family he was born to and the one he made for himself. Such an intimately inspired thesis statement coming from the artist himself, however, is no match for the equally impassioned interpretation his music is fed through on its way to my heart, that externally applied force handily eclipsing the intent it was flung into the world with.

“Fall of ’82” is plucked right from Mercer’s childhood, an ode to the sister twice his age who was just relatable enough to confide in and just maternal enough to expertly provide parental advice without sounding woefully out of touch to an adolescent boy grappling with the emotional whiplash of moving to a new town half a world away from his old one at such a formative, precarious age.

It’s a song that hits a little harder every time it comes on the heels of talking to my brother, who will always be Little Brudduh regardless of how much taller and smarter than me he is. Being the only member of my nuclear family I keep in touch with doesn’t set much of a bar to clear when I haven’t spoken to our parents in 12 years, but when we do talk, it’s usually a densely packed conversation that makes the quiet stretches more reassuringly familiar than deafeningly silent.

We had one of those confessional exchanges fairly recently for our arms’-length relationship, which began with my heart in my throat (a former bandmate of his reached out to me with the kind of message that strikes panicked fear in any big sister) and ended with an absolution I didn’t know I could get by just talking around the guilt it turns out I could have put down at any time if I just had the courage to act like the older sibling for once. Between it all, though, was a volley of exchanges that, when I later read them to my husband, sounded like a conversion with myself because Brother, I know you and relate to you in so many ways. And no matter how much time and comfortable quiet stretches out between us, we’ll both always be lost in this strange world together.